


Snow After Fire

by cognomen



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Complete, F/M, Gen, In which Harold stayed with Grace as they continued to work on the Project, In which Nathan did not die in the Ferry explosion, M/M, Nathan makes questionable life decisions, Past Nathan/Harold, Pining, alchemist!Nathan, alchemist!harold, dragon!Reese, forming friendships between rivals, present harold/grace, witch!Grace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24362233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: Nathan finds the injured creature collapsed in the middle of central park. At first, his instincts to help it war with his sense of self preservation. There’s a voice in the back of his mind, and it sounds like Harold’s sharp warning not to get involved with anything magical. It’s his own desire to take a chance on helping something that argues against it.In the end, though, the monster raises it’s dark, serpentine neck to look at him, uttering a weak but still terrifying hiss. Nathan takes the middle road between sympathy and caution.-A modern magic au in which Nathan finds an injured dragon in Central Park and takes it home to help it. In the process he begins to mend his relationships with his former flame, Harold, and Harold's current girlfriend, Grace Hendricks... who may just be the glue that keeps this whole thing together.
Relationships: Harold Finch & Grace Hendricks & Nathan Ingram, Harold Finch/Grace Hendricks, Harold Finch/Nathan Ingram, Nathan Ingram & John Reese
Comments: 9
Kudos: 17
Collections: Exchange of Interest 2020





	Snow After Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [st_aurafina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/gifts).



Nathan finds the injured creature collapsed in the middle of central park. At first, his instincts to help it war with his sense of self preservation. There’s a voice in the back of his mind, and it sounds like Harold’s sharp warning not to get involved with anything magical. It’s his own desire to take a chance on helping something that argues against it.

In the end, though, the monster raises it’s dark, serpentine neck to look at him, uttering a weak but still terrifying hiss. Nathan takes the middle road between sympathy and caution. If he can befriend it, it could be useful. The fact that he has no idea how to do so, aside from patching it up and hoping is the sort of thing he’s never let stop him before.

The problem is he doesn’t know anything about dragons except that most of them are pretty secretive, and usually they work for people more powerful than him in the modern world. This one has a couple arrows sticking out of its chest and gut, so that seems to be the first problem. 

“We better get you out of here,” Nathan says, more to himself. Except, how? The creature is out here in the middle of the park. The closest place to get it to is the Library—except, imagining the creature smashing through the rows of bookshelves and rampaging into all their alchemy equipment, all their carefully laid magic circles trampled underclaw is not a good one.

_ Maybe the basement? _ Nathan guesses it’s his best option, and the freight entrance is probably big enough for the dragon to get through. Now, how to get it to follow him? Nathan reaches out and then hesitates, before he decides he’s committed to this bad decision, and he puts his hand on the dragon’s neck, attempting to push it up onto its feet.

The dragon turns an unsure gaze on him, then heaves a sigh and gets heavily up, looking at Nathan with an alien intelligence that unsettles him. Will it follow on it’s own? Would it respond to commands? Was it a trained dragon?  _ Do those exist? _

He’s not an idiot when it comes to magical things, but Nathan is feeling his specialization in material magics the same way he often does when Harold picks up a book of coded spell circles and not only immediately understands but improves on the source. Magical creatures are beyond his area of expertise—and so rare these days that it was like not knowing conversational Latin, anyway.

Thinking quickly, if not perhaps the most rationally, Nathan unloops the half-undone tie from his neck and then after a moment to wonder if this is like trying to tie a bell on a tiger, he leans in anyway and affixes it around the long, slender neck like a leash. He keeps it loose. When that doesn’t result in his immediate mauling, the faint buzz of alcohol left over from earlier in the evening lends him an ill-advised confidence.

“Come this way,” he says, wondering if Dragons get training commands like dogs, but despite how awkward it is due to the short tie and the tall dragon, it follows Nathan’s tugging and guidance as he leads it through the short city streets and to the service entrance, feeling conspicuous every step of the way.

-

In the morning, hungover and waking up with the gritty impression of his workbench stamped into his cheek. He remembers the fight with Harold, first—about the dangers of acting like vigilante defenders with information they got from a summon spirit, no matter how many truth clauses were bound into the holding circle.

Then, Nathan remembers the rest of the night, and groans. His head pounds slowly, a good sign of a night spent making bad decisions. He gets up, stumbling into the bathroom to splash water on his face, then shoves a plastic cup under the faucet to drink it dry, twice. 

He looks at himself in the mirror, bags under his eyes and the impression of the edge of his desk blotter creased into his stubbly cheek. He leans against the cold glass of the mirror and waits for the water to metabolize, paying attention to the cues from his stomach.

_ I think I brought home a dragon last night? _

The thought makes Nathan straighten up quickly. It seems ridiculous in the light of day, there’s no way—except he can still see the stains on his suit. Blood?  _ I guess I’m lucky it’s not acid. _ He strips off the ruined suit coat then searches for a clean patch on the tails. He wets it down and uses it to wash his face properly, feeling more aware afterward. 

He remembers getting the dragon in through the service entrance, into the basement, designed for box trucks and heavy equipment, in case any of the generators or boilers needed replacement. The sort of foresight that would have given the Library durability and longevity for years into the future, if not for falling victim to budgetary cuts.

Bad for the city, good for their project. Nathan supposes he’d better go down into the basement and deal with the mess he tracked in. He puts himself together as best he can, then heads for the antiquated staff elevator, wishing yet again they could keep an espresso machine here or at least a microwave. Something about appliances interferes with magic. Leylines don’t like microwaves, or something like that. He wants coffee, to ward off the childhood memories that are welling up. 

Nathan once saved a rabbit. It’s a nebulous childhood memory—he’d been old enough to ride his bike to the store on his own. On the main street, in the gutter, he’d ridden past a rabbit. At first he was sure it was just more roadkill, but a vibrancy in the eyes caused him to stop and look twice. He’d entered a kind of standoff, stopped on his bike and kickstanding it up with his foot. Then the rabbit blinked at him and breathed, stretched out on one side and otherwise motionless. He’d been faced with his first real quandary at the time. Even young as he was, he’d never seen a rabbit so close and so still. It implied a grave injury. Was he supposed to interfere?

The elevator reaches the basement, and all these years later he’s still got no answer. He steps off the elevator into the dim, and calls out quietly as much in deference to his own hangover as to avoid startling a creature far more likely to kill him than a rabbit.

-

He makes it until noon before he has to admit defeat—or at least that he needs help. He can’t go to Harold, at least not without being able to report a success. He can’t stand to admit even a potential failure when he’s still stubbornly holding onto the hope that he can convince Harold to see things his way. Maybe when he gives Harold evidence of his ability to do something right, or at least he could prove the theory that the information they got can be put to beneficial use. 

But, he’s not sure he’s helping. A healed dragon might be convinced to serve as a protector for them, especially Grace. As much as Nathan has to pick apart what Harold means when he says things, it’s obvious what he meant when he made his point about getting involved with things—and possibly people—they can’t protect themselves from.  _ He meant Grace. He doesn’t want to—to drag her into anything dangerous _ . 

It’s the sort of gentlemanly chauvinism that seems to endear Harold to some women. He doesn’t want to—sully her purity or something. It’s not that she isn’t familiar with magic—she does enough of her own, but it’s free of the darkness that Harold perceives in their own. She’s never brought a dark spirit into a summoning circle and Harold wants to keep her divided and segmented off from that. Like you could just live two lives forever—or even more lives, maybe—with enough planning. 

Nathan knows that even one and a half lives is eventually too much. It might be years from now, but Harold will eventually have to choose either to shed all lives but one, or to merge them and handle the fallout. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess which half he’ll choose. Selfishly, Nathan wants to secure his part in Harold’s future, feeling more and more like every time he takes a step out of synch it gets harder to catch back up and Harold sidesteps a little further away.

_ I need help _ , Nathan reminds himself. If he can’t go to Harold, then he really only has one option. He doesn’t like it. She probably won’t like it, but he knows it’s the right move. So he goes to her apartments, and then when ringing the bell gets no answer he heads around back into the tiny scrap of land between the back of this building and the back wall of the one behind it, facing the next street over. There’s a tiny porch; just big enough for two deck chairs. The rest is a green and blooming explosion of plants overflowing from raised planters and pots. A small city miracle—the sort of magic in the unexpected that Grace surrounds herself with.

She’s there, too, relaxing in a cheap plastic adirondack chair that has a chain and padlock attaching it more or less permanently to the deck; twofold protection against theft. The item is too cheap to be worth taking the time to cut the chain. She’s reading and not painting, at least—so he won’t be interrupting something she can’t come back to. She looks up when his shadow stretches onto the concrete patio. She smiles thinly at him, as if he’s tracked something in and her patience is stretched fondly by it.

“Good morning, Nathan,” she says, book still open on her lap as if she expects it to be a quick visit. “Harold’s not here, if you’re looking for him.”

She has such an endless patience for his secretive wanderings, which she allows him to thinly cover over with his excuses about not being very interesting. Nathan’s not sure about her—least of all he's’ not sure she believes Harold’s excuses so much as she has some blind confidence that the truth doesn’t matter to what they have and her blind confidence that Harold will always come home to her. 

Nathan envies that, though wild horses couldn’t drag him into admitting it. “I’m not looking for Harold.”

She keeps her hand pressed over the pages of her book, a mass-market paperback that’s just slightly taller than they used to be for the aging population that still reads bound books—it helps accommodate a slightly larger font. She’s reading a surprisingly modern looking novel; the title partly beneath her hand, writing across the header of the page in bold print reads,  _ The Golden Virgin. _

“A new book?” he asks, stupidly.

“A new translation of an old book,” she says, a little defensively. She pulls it closer to herself, protective of her privacy, as if Nathan might gain some kind of powerful influence over her by knowing what books to send to her for Christmas.

“Grace, I need your help with something,” Nathan finally asks, aware that he still probably looks half-unmade, unshowered and without his suit coat.

It changes something in her face as she looks up at him, softly curious at what it is he wants to make peace with her over. “What?”

“Really, you should just see it,” Nathan explains by not explaining.

“Alright,” She says, placing a bookmark between the pages of her book and folding it closed. She stretches as she gets up from the deck chair and Nathan doesn’t know how she lives in the city—the  _ biggest _ city in the country—instead of in a cottage somewhere with the whole pastoral countryside laid out for her enjoyment. 

She leaves the book, having faith that it won’t be stolen. “So where is this something you need my help with?”

“At the library.”

She quirks an eyebrow at him, latching the decorative wrought-iron gate behind them as they leave. “The boys-only club.” 

“We’re going to break a few rules today.”

-

She enters the dim library and seems to carry light with her into it, spreading some inner illumination with her own personal magic. The space has always had a liminal quality; a dusty magic all its own that contrasts with the fresh greenery of her witchery.

“Well, here we are,” she says, tucking her hands behind her. “I’ll do my best not to look at too much.”

“It’s this way,” Nathan pushes down his irritation at her teasing.

“Lead on.”

They file into the elevator, and Nathan pulls the old metal gate closed, running them down into the depths of the basement. It's the only part of the library with enough open space—between the generators, equipment, and file storage rooms, long since rendered empty.

It smells musty and now there’s an animal scent—a cinnamon-musk and illness smell. It’s old blood and dry spice, something that seems to just exude from the dragon. Nathan wonders what it smells like when it’s not dying. 

“Okay, now I have to ask,” Grace says, hesitating in the elevator’s doorway before stepping into the dark, intimidating basement.

“It’s not dangerous,” Nathan promises.

The sound of their voices draws a low rumble in answer, and from the shadows on the other end of the main utility room a pair of eyeshine-glowing green eyes raises up slowly from floor level. 

Grace shifts a step backward on instinct. “ _ Nathan _ .”

_ Hopefully it doesn’t suddenly change its mind and decide to eat us.  _ Nathan steps forward, trying to demonstrate that it’s okay. 

After a moment she asks, “What  _ is _ it?”

“A dragon. It’s hurt.”

“A dragon?” she hisses, grabbing him by the arm to look him in the eyes, an echo of alarm in hers. When she realizes he isn’t joking, she demands, “Where did you get a dragon?”

“Central park.”

“You’re enjoying this!” Grace accuses. Now she’s looking at him like he’s a new brand of idiot, and he feels every bit of one.

“He hasn’t eaten me yet,” Nathan knows it’s a weak defense, but immediately provable.

Grace sighs, and then looks back toward the assembly of boilers and generators that the dragon is barely hidden behind. He can see the reflection of the two glowing balefire spots in her eyes as she meets its gaze. It hasn’t moved other than to look at them, just watching with the same pained and tired resolve it’s had all morning. Grace firms her resolve, letting go of his arm and putting her hands on her hips.

“For the record,” she says. “This is a terrible idea. Harold doesn’t know, does he?”

“No, not yet.” 

“And he shouldn’t,” she agrees. “Which is why you came to see me.”

The dragon shifts, scraping scales roughly against the cement floor with a sound like a file on wood. Grace squares herself and marches toward it.

When he follows her out of the circle of light, his eyes adjust to the change—slower, at his age, much to the detriment of his night driving—and reveal the whole sad setup. Nathan had managed to find some shipping blankets for the dragon to lay on, and then done his best to treat the wounds. It’s watching them warily from behind the machines, watching their approach warily.

“We’re here to help,” Grace says, in a soothing tone. She keeps the pace of her approach measured and steady. “Do you think it understands us?”

“No idea.” It hasn’t occurred to Nathan to try and communicate with it. 

“Well,” she says, her tone still smooth and reassuring. “It’s not as big as you would think. A young one, maybe?”

“I haven’t had occasion to be around many dragons. How big are they  _ supposed _ to be?”

It’s a little taller at the shoulder than a horse, but with substantial length in the neck and tail. It seems  _ plenty _ big to Nathan.

She stops just out of easy reach, measuring the whole picture with her gaze. Nathan figures it probably seems just as big to her when she’s right up close to it. She shows it her empty hands, as if to convey that she doesn’t mean to hurt it. Like  _ she _ is the dangerous one in this scenario. 

The dragon looks at her for a long minute, measuring her right back with more than animal intelligence. Nathan has a feeling that the dragon is—maybe all dragons are—intelligent.

“You won’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you, right?” Grace says, maybe voicing her thoughts aloud. “Where are you injured?”

The dragon shifts, lifting one wing and a foreclaw to display Nathan’s clumsy work. 

“You understood that?” she asks, looking up at the dragon and meeting its grey-green gaze. She doesn’t get an answer in words, but maybe the long, narrow head inclines a little.

Nathan’s not the sort to believe in coincidence, but he also doesn’t take a lot on faith. This small indicator doesn’t convince him, yet.

“Can I have a closer look?” Grace has always been the one out of the three of them who can go the furthest on the least.

The next sign is even slighter, the dragon shifting its weight in a way that will make it more comfortable to hold its wing up so she can see the two holes in the tough hide.

“What happened?” Grace asks, crouching down to look closer. The wounds are ugly and oozing, ragged tears in the tough hide. Even though the dragon doesn’t seem to have red blood or pink skin, beneath the scales it looks angry and unhealthy even to Nathan’s untrained eye.

“Arrows,” Nathan answers, since the question had to be for him. “I took them out.”

“Well, you made a mess,” Grace says, matter-of-factly. “I think this is infected.”

“What do we do about that?” 

“For a dragon?” She puffs out her cheeks in a sigh. “I don’t know but at this point we could hardly make it worse. Get me clean, hot water and something to clean these out with, then go upstairs and find any books on dragons Harold has squirreled away up there.”

Nathan feels momentarily petulant, resistant to being ordered around by her, but no matter how jealous he is, he  _ asked _ for her help. So, he jams his pride into his back pocket and goes to do as she asks.

-

Over the next three days they make steady progress. Most of what Nathan finds in Harold’s collection concerns the darker aspects of what dragon parts are useful in the practice of rough arcane magic. The rest is historical, or makes reference only in passing.

There was at least one government program involving them, but everything else is expressed in limited ways. It almost feels censored. Still, it's alive and Grace’s good sense and green magic help it heal. They keep the wound clean and feed the dragon, keep it warm. Nathan has no idea if it needs a basking spot like a reptile, but it seems to gravitate toward the warmth of the generators so he increases the temperature a few degrees in the basement. 

By the end of the three days, Grace is sure it’s intelligent, and Harold is suspicious of Nathan’s sneaking around.

“He’s going to figure it out sometime,” Grace says, practically.

“There has to be a way to tell him that won’t upset him,” Nathan says. He’s sure Harold will be mad about Grace coming to the library, too. 

“I doubt it,” she says, washing her hands after changing the dragon’s bandage. She looks up at her oversized patient, and the dragon meets her gaze calmly. “And how do you feel today?”

The dragon obligingly stretches itself, demonstrating range of movement.

“Good,” Grace says, reaching up to gently put her hand behind the wing joint and rub almost idly, a liberty that Nathan wouldn’t take. “But don’t overdo it. When you’re ready you can get back up on your feet and move around some, but listen to your body when it tells you to stop.”

Nathan’s still not sure it’s  _ that _ intelligent, but Grace might be talking herself through it as much as both of them.

The dragon’s eyes seem to close a little in bliss as she rubs its shoulder, before she gets up, taking the makeshift first aid kit she’s put together for this with her. “Same time tomorrow?” 

“Yes,” Nathan agrees. “Harold doesn’t usually come in until after eleven.”

Grace eyes him a long time, then seems to decide to keep whatever advice she was about to offer to herself. Nathan is struck again by how perfect she is for Harold, all parts of him, even if Harold's worry and paranoia means he carefully curates himself for her. 

It’s Nathan that gets all the rough edges and unfinished ends. If Nathan wasn’t so worried about being completely replaced, he might tell Harold that she was just as capable of handling him—maybe even more so than Nathan is at times.

“Thank you, Grace,” Nathan says as they ride the elevator up.

“He owes me thanks,” Grace says. “You can just figure out how to get us out of trouble.”

“He?”

“The dragon.”

“You think it’s male? How can you tell?”

Grace turns a look at Nathan that he feels is unfairly judgmental, before she just shrugs. “It’s just a feeling I have.”

Nathan smiles in spite of himself. “You want to wager on it?”

“Not really. I’m positive, so it’s no fun to bet on the sure win.”

He defers to her superior certainty, and sees her out before heading back to the archives to be sure nothing seems out of place for Harold’s arrival.

-

Nathan’s thoughts keep going back to the rabbit; he remembers the look in his mother’s eyes when he brought it home wrapped in his shirt, how she’d said very little. Now, he knows she just hadn’t known what to say. Whether she should encourage his compassion or ready him for inevitability. He felt compelled at the time to keep checking on the rabbit; they’d bedded it in an open cardboard box in the laundry room. He knew from TV and the movies that you were supposed to check on an injured animal. He hadn’t quite yet connected the concept with making sure they were still alive.

The same instinct makes Nathan want to keep checking on the dragon though he has to hold it in check while he works with Harold on the restraining circles and truth bindings and the further failsafes for keeping the creature they summoned bound perfectly in place, giving no more and no less than  _ exactly _ what was required of it.

At the end of the day, Nathan is covered in chalk and the remains of his patience after Harold banishes yet another incarnation of the information spirit back beyond the edges of reality.

“I still don’t see what was wrong with that one,” Nathan can’t help but continue the argument, even if all he wants is for Harold to be  _ satisfied _ and go home so he can check on Schrodinger’s Dragon in the basement.

“They’re still trying to please me,” Harold answers shortly. His narrow shoulders are tense, probably stiff from working on circles all day.

“So? You can tell them that what pleases you is the information you want?”

“Nathan, please,” Harold tips his head to look at him over the rims of his glasses. “This is serious.”

_ I was being serious. _ Nathan keeps his thoughts to himself. He wonders when the bright-eyed ‘because I can’ had gone out of Harold. He’d had it at MIT, still seemed to possess it when they’d first started this project, but it’s like the weight of protection has ground it out of him. Out of a wild impulse, Nathan seizes for some remnant of the past.

“Why don’t we go get dinner, Harold? We can work it out over a bottle of wine. You always come up with brilliant circles on napkins.”

Harold looks at him, and Nathan tries not to feel like an idiot—but Harold actually looks wistful for once. “I’d actually love to, Nathan, but—”

Nathan’s hope crumples like a paper bag around the hard knot in his chest. 

“Grace has an exhibition opening at a gallery tonight,” Harold finishes, apologetically.

“Of course,” Nathan says tightly. Grace hadn’t mentioned it to him, but why would she? It’s not his business, even if they have spoken to each other a lot more these last few days.

“How about tomorrow?” Harold tries for an armistice. Nathan resists the urge to be petty and make up an excuse for some other social event that he doesn’t actually have. It’s petty payback, and he won’t feel better.

“Alright, but I’m holding you to that,” Nathan says. He has something to do right now to distract himself, anyway. “Try to enjoy yourself among all those elite art snobs.”

“It’s Grace’s night, I’m just the moral support. Where are you going?”

“I forgot my keys inside,” Nathan pantomimes patting his pockets. “You go on, I’ll be fine.”

It’s almost the same dance he’s been doing for the last half a week; Nathan actually hasn’t gone home except to shower, shave, and change his suit. 

The urge to drive back and check on the dragon would be too strong.

-

Downstairs, he settles in for another night, arranging his work supplies next to the couch he’d dragged out of storage. The dragon is sleeping, and Nathan knows the adage. He orders food for pickup, then settles in with a book of circle theory and a notebook, determined to keep up with Harold.

The dragon’s deep, easy breathing is almost hypnotic, and Nathan is fifteen minutes late to pick up his order. He’s barely done anything except re-read the same page four times. When he gets back with his food it takes him a moment to notice the dragon is watching him.

“You hungry? I wish I knew what it was okay to feed you.” Nathan laments, setting down the styrofoam box with his dinner in it. The dragon’s gaze follows it intently. “That would barely be a snack. What if I order you a whole pizza?” 

The dragon gets slowly to his feet, heavily favoring the forelimb nearest the injury. He comes closer, and Nathan moves out of the way as the dragon settles down with his head and neck on the couch, like a pillow, except it’s stiff commercial furniture. Nathan sighs, wishing he had the rapport Grace seems to have with the dragon. “Is that a yes?”

The dragon rolls one eye up toward him and nods. Nathan orders first two, then four large pizzas after second-guessing himself. 

It’s with a certain fascination that Nathan watches the dragon eat them all, even as he can barely find the interest to finish his own dinner. In the end, the dragon eats his leftovers, too, and then settles down again with his chin on the couch, like he needs the closeness of another living being.

“I should have thought of that earlier,” Nathan says. “Guess I was just preoccupied. My partner and I are trying to work something out.”

Nathan settles on the other end of the couch, arranging himself to leave room for the dragon. It’s not a situation he ever expected to be in, but he supposes that’s so much of his life these days he can roll with it. 

“I’ll make sure you have food tomorrow, too. I have plans in the evening,” Nathan arranges the book in his lap, tapping the end of his pencil on the pad of paper. The dragon’s listening, one sleepy green-gray eye on Nathan. Crazily, Nathan wonders if it’s lonely—if dragons are social creatures.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Nathan admits. “Harold owns this place. How am I going to tell him about you?”

The dragon may or may not understand more than the tone of his voice, but he doesn’t answer. Nathan chooses to think of it as an agreement that it’s too tricky to sort out right away, like the binding circle Harold wants to be perfect, even over functional. 

“I thought we could give you a job,” Nathan continues, sketching an idle curve with his pencil. “But I was a little drunk. You look like you’d be good at protection, but I have no idea how we’d get a dragon bodyguard past—well, everybody. Anybody.”

The dragon is still looking at him, though the rest of his posture is easy and almost slumped, breathing slower. Listening to Nathan’s voice as he sinks down into sleep, blinking slowly with the extra membrane over the one eye Nathan can see, like cats do.

Nathan gets a sense of trust, somehow, or like the idea that he’s been disregarded as a threat. Until a few days ago, he wouldn’t have thought there was much a dragon would be threatened by—but this one was just as mortal as any creature he’s encountered, and the city has as many threats for him as for the rest of them. Nathan wishes he knew how the injuries came about, what the dragon’s story was.

Something about the rhythmic breathing relaxes Nathan, he finds himself matching the pattern subconsciously. He rarely sleeps easy, at least without a few drinks to ease the way, but this seems to come naturally and Nathan’s head lolls back after a few minutes as he starts to drift off. Dreaming overtakes him before his eyes have closed fully and the burry vision through his slightly unaligned contact lenses combines with the onset of sleep to make it appear that there’s a man curled half-on, half-off the couch beside him, head pillowed on his arms.

_ Some dream. _

-

He doesn’t sleep long, though it's’ deeper than he recalls sleeping recently. His neck lolls back and stiffens, then wakes him with an aching protest that leaves him momentarily stuck in place. He has to wind himself up to move, and his neck protests like a rusty set of door hinges when he lifts his head. It hurts, and he tries to stretch it until the stiffness leaves. He manages to loosen it some, but it promises to stay sore for hours.

The thought strikes him for advil or tylenol, and Nathan starts to stand up when he spots something his half-asleep mind registers as wrong. There’s a naked man asleep on the couch. Well, half-on the couch, knees on the floor with his head down on his arms. Nathan’s body reacts before he’s fully registered what that all means, and he scrambles backward over the couch arm with a yelp loud enough to echo.

His heart pounds, sending a flood of adrenaline into his system, but the man on the couch only moves slowly to wakefulness. Nathan waits anxiously, trying to accept the facts as what he sees.

The man on the couch doesn’t move much, maybe aware of his own nakedness or maybe trying not to spook the obviously concerned Nathan further. The man’s hair is silver-gray, his eyes green, and despite Nathan’s knowledge of magic and the obvious evidence in front of him, his mind rejects the thought.

“Good morning, Nathan,” the man says. He has a voice that’s papery and soft, a rasp produced low in the throat.

Nathan can see the healing puncture wounds in the man’s side, dotted along his ribs under his upraised arm. On his back, between his shoulder blades is a tattooed binding circle in brown ink, broken by a healing scar - shiny skin. It’s not rendered completely powerless that way, but parts of it are disabled. Nathan has to shake himself to remember to answer. His neck hurts. “Who are you?”

“You can call me John,” the man answers, and his features twist in a wry, slow, ageless amusement. He looks ruggedly handsome, if tired and a little dirty. He has sharp cheekbones and eyes that seem relaxed now, but Nathan suspects they can weaponize in an instant. “Is there a blanket, or—?”

Nathan has to think about it before he remembers the stack Grace left for the dragon. He starts to get one automatically, then hesitates, just wanting to be sure that there hasn’t been a truly outstanding set of coincidences.”Could you have done this the whole time?” 

John gives him a long look, shifting his knees on the floor and sticking his head. “It takes a lot of energy. I didn’t have it while I was just starting to heal.”

“Can all dragons, uh—assuming that’s what you really are—change shape like that?”

The dragon—John—stretches a little, but doesn’t get up, waiting for Nathan to bring him something to cover up with. “Why do you think you’ve never seen one before?”

-

Grace arrives early, and Nathan thinks that’s going to set the pace for the whole day. He intercepts her at the front door after leaving John huddled in the blankets for warmth and modesty.

“I brought coffee and bagels,” Grace waves a paper bag at him. “There’s enough for Harold so we can use it as a peace offering when we tell him?”

Nathan looks at her for a long minute, having forgotten any such thoughts in the aftermath. “There’s been a complication.”

“What  _ isn’t _ complicated?” Grace asks. “Is he okay?”

“Harold?”

Grace selects a coffee cup from the cardboard drink carrier and presses it into Nathan’s hands. “Harold is fine, I saw him last night. The dragon.”

Nathan takes a long sip of coffee to steady himself. “Yes, I think so. He ate four large pizzas yesterday.”

Grace looks at him, one eyebrow raised. “I can see by your face that I better just come see what the complication is.”

Nathan just nods. His mind feels sluggish from lack of sleep, but the coffee helps. On the elevator he remembers to extend the olive branch back. “How did your gallery exhibition go?”

She looks at him, some combination of curiosity and pleasure that he would ask. “It went well. Not a huge turnout, but we nearly sold out of tickets. I wonder if someone had a hand in that?”

“I’m not sure,” Nathan admits. Harold hadn’t told him anything about it before last night. “But things have a way of going just right when Harold’s around, don’t they?”

He has a magic in arrangement—the ability to align probability and possibility up together. Nathan has always envied it. Grace nods at him, and for a moment they both have an understanding. Nathan has always favored Grace with the distant affection reserved for people that matter to your friends, but held her at arm’s length. Maybe so she wouldn’t see all the petty jealousy.

“See, you do trust him,” she says. “He’ll understand if we tell him about all this.”

“Sure, eventually,” Nathan says. “How many bagels did you say you brought?”

They step off the elevator and Grace offers a one-shouldered shrug. “A dozen.”

“Good, John probably wants some breakfast, too.”

“John?”

Nathan gestures at the dragon—in man shape—bundled up in blankets on the couch. He’s watching Grace warily, anticipating some reaction. Grace only smiles. “Oh! It stuck this time. You must be feeling better.”

Nathan turns to her, but years of practice with Harold springing the unexpected on him means he can keep from gaping openly. Then he remembers her certainty about gender and he has to chuckle. “Remind me not to bet against you.”

“I usually have inside information,” she grins at him. Nathan is charmed by her smile in spite of himself. Then she goes to introduce herself to John, offering him some bagels.

-

The story unfolds slowly as John almost studiously consumes the entire dozen bagels, haltingly and guarded at first. Grace seems to be able to draw him out. Once he starts talking he seems to need to finish. He’s careful about some details, but it comes out that he was in the employ of the government, part of some special operations team. Something went wrong with the last job and he’d been marked for disposal, some careless trimming of a loose end that knew too much.

He’d taken the injury making his escape, but it left him unable to hold the human glamour that would let him hide more easily. Nathan thinks of the damaged circle on his back, and with the rest of the scarcity of information on dragons, supposes that’s all part of some attempt to control the information about their special operations agents. Another project like theirs, in perpetual darkness.

‘I…” John fades out at the end of his story, pulling the blankets a little tighter around himself. “Can go in a few more days. I’m sorry, it’s dangerous for me to be here.”

“No, of course not,” Grace says, immediately. “If I know my fiance, this is the safest place for you to be.”

John tilts his head at her, then looks to Nathan for confirmation. Nathan swallows, unsure how much to explain with Grace present. He doesn’t miss how intensely she’s looking at him, either. He clears his throat, trying to put together a version of events that will fit with whatever Harold has told her. He’s saved—in a gut-wrenching way—by the sound of the elevator coming on. They all turn toward it and Nathan feels exhaustion and resignation come over him.

“I’ll… figure something out to tell him,’ Nathan resigns himself to taking the brunt of the fallout. It’s the hole  _ he’s _ dug, after all. Crazily, he hopes it won’t damage what Harold built with Grace. He resolves to protect that with anything he can, surprised at himself.

When the elevator door opens, Harold notes that the gate is already pushed back. He has a few printed papers in his hands, but he looks up from them and lasers in on the trio—Nathan first, then Grace, and then finally a stranger wrapped in blankets on the couch. The softness fades out of his gaze. 

Harold’s face isn’t built for anger, and Nathan’s not sure Harold feels that emotion the same way everyone else does. It always seems to diverge on the first point of upset, transforming into disappointment and resolve. Maybe it’s a way to shelter his own emotions. 

“Well,” Harold says, in a measured tone. “I came down to see why we were using more electricity, and I suppose I have my answer.”

‘Good morning, Harold,” Grace says with a smile. “Come sit down. I think we’d better have a talk.” 

“Yes,” Harold says, guardedly. “I suppose we had better. Hello, John.”

John startles almost visibly on the couch, and Nathan also stifles his surprise, wondering if there’s anything he’ll ever know before Harold.

“You don’t know me,” Harold continues, stepping closer, crossing the distance with an easy stride. He’s finally recovered after the months of therapy, enough to move like he always had again. “But I’ve been following your career very closely since last year. I’m glad to know your termination was greatly exaggerated.”

He stops next to Nathan, turning a firm, demanding look at him. “But I admit, I’m not quite sure what you’re doing  _ here _ .” 

John huffs a gravely sound of surprise, and then shifts over on the couch, looking up at the three of them with clear uncertainty. Finally he answers, his tone turning a little sardonic. “I guess, looking for a job?” 

-

End. 

  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> -The Golden Virgin, by Kodo Nomura, a collection of the early Zenigata Heiji mystery stories.  
> -I know Grace is only portrayed as into truly classic literature but she must like mysteries in my mind. She dates Harold. So I found some classic mysteries for her.  
> -I have some more ideas but I am out of time, I may revisit this universe. I feel this is a cohesive 'get the gang together' piece, and just enough of an unusual slice of life to satisfy. Hope you enjoy!!


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